UC Irvine is committed to preparing the next generation of
thinkers, innovators, and entrepreneurs to help the world
meet its profound environmental and social justice challenges.

UCI Global Sustainability Resource Center

The GSRC unleashes youth leadership for community resilience to a changing climate and cultivates a campus culture of sustainability. This pursuit informs our students’ academics, career choices, and ways of life. As the University of California steps up as a global force for climate resilience, GSRC enables UC Irvine students to shape this legacy.

The GSRC is a hub for students, providing resources, education, and programming to forward environmental balance, economic vitality, and social equity. Students, as well as campus and community partners, are invited to share a platform from which to address the root causes of ecological disruption, deepen understandings of the interdependence of all life, and engage the challenges and solutions of sustainability in a campus, community, and global context.

The GSRC is anchored by a physical resource center offering a host of student services. Students come into the GSRC via our outreach programs, internship/fellowship placements, and trainings pathway. Our student and staff team co-creates actions with campus and community partners that build skills and experience along three sustainability pathways:

First incubated by former UC Irvine Environment Institute, the Resource Center is now supported by a partnership among the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, Division of Undergraduate Education, and UCI Community Resilience Projects. It is shaped by the input from students, guided by the support of staff, and modeled after many existing sustainability resource centers at other University of California campuses. GSRC enjoys a working partnership with the Student Housing Sustainability Program.

The purpose of the campus as a living lab pathway is to provide students with practical experience, training, and exposure to a range of projects that increase the sustainability of our campus’s physical operations and systems. The desired outcome is for students to know how to use their hands and conduct applied research to meet actual needs.

The purpose of the global engagement and immersion pathway is to provide students and youth counterparts in partner communities with practical experience, training, and exposure to activities that strengthen the critical lens on a local-global solidarity and deepen their understanding of the interdependence of all life. The desired outcome is for our young people to move with interpersonal agility, compassion, and equity-oriented systems thinking in any setting in which they are bridging across traditional boundaries (cultural, political, national, sectoral, disciplinary).

Read about the global engagement programs GSRC piloted in 2015 with SERES Leadership Center in Guatemala here and here.

GSRC’s current global engagement and immersion opportunities focus on building community climate resilience in U.S. domestic settings, especially on the UC Irvine campus and together with community partners in Orange County. Read more about UCI’s Community Resilience Projects to learn how to get involved. Our invitation for collaboration extends broadly to student leaders, staff, faculty, and community members who are engaged in work for racial and social equity and/or sustainability.

The UCI Sustainability Co-Curricular Working Group (SCWG) is a diverse group of campus representatives that include students, staff and faculty. SCWG puts together programs and opportunities for students to extend their sustainability education outside the classroom.

Would you like to get involved with UCI’s Sustainability Co-Curricular Working Group? Contact Rachel Harvey at raharvey@uci.edu.

Student Resources

Staff & Faculty Resources

ABOUT

UC Irvine’s legacy of sustainability began when shovel first hit dirt at the dedication of the campus by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Today, UCI continues to go beyond the classroom to put research to work to improve lives, the community, and the world.